OLPC team shows off UI design

At the keynote for the recent UX Week conference in Washington, DC, designers from the OLPC project and Pentagram Design gave a live demonstration of the laptop's Sugar user interface, including a "zoom" spacial navigation system and its extensive collaboration tools. Using a handheld video camera to relay the screens of four on-stage laptops to the audience, presenters showed Sugar running smoothly on actual XO hardware.

Sugar is based around the idea of abstraction and social networking, UI designer Christian Schmidt said, with four zoom levels available. He referred to these levels as relationship spheres, characterized by trust and organization. The lowest level is simply the working application.